Teams Work: Taking a fresh approach to finding the fit

Toxic people and personalities don’t just poison your company culture; they can wreck your chances of achieving sustainable success. On the other hand, you also don’t want to seek employment at a company that doesn’t foster your personal and professional growth. Knowing who to hire is crucial for employers and choosing the right team is a must for job seekers. This is where Good&Co comes in, making the connections that matter with tools and tests that assess your personal strengths and traits within a professional workplace. Our host Peggy Anne Salz catches up with Armando Osuna, VP Global Sales, BD, and Customer Success at Good&Co, to talk about the science that powers the app, the benefits to companies and employees and the impact of a new Culture Platform that has been called the “job-hunting lovechild of eHarmony and LinkedIn.”

Peggy: Hi, welcome to Mobile Growth Podcasters where frontline growth marketing experts share their insights, experiences, expertise, what it takes so that you can became a better mobile marketer. I’m your host Peggy Anne Salz from Mobile Growth where I help my clients grow their revenues and audience and reach through content marketing. And on my watch, this series will introduce you to the people who know how to drive growth. And my guest today is Armando Osuna. He is VP Global Sales, BD, and Customer Success at good.co, great to have you Armando.

Armando: Hi Peggy. How are you?

Peggy: So good.co, I’m gonna ask you about the company, but I’m also going to ask you to explain not just what you do but why you do it because it’s certainly not just for the good of us all.

Armando: You know, you hear this word culture being tossed around in not only Silicon Valley but you hear tossed around a lot in terms of what does it mean when that word comes into your organ. A lot of people related it to like beer pong tables and transit buses, but while those are good tactics, that’s not really your culture. Culture is like a set of values. And so at Good&Co;, what we do is we put quantitative analysis to culture to help people, your employees, your potential hires make sure that they’re fitting in with the team that they’re about to join and also the company they’re about to join.

Peggy: So you do this through quizzes in an app. Is that right?

Armando: Yes. So we actually use real, hard science. There’s a five-factored form analysis, which is MBTI and all these really amazing psychometric tests that essentially have been around for a very long time. We added our own unique flavor that made it our own algorithm. And by us doing…you doing a simple 18 question quiz, you’re gonna get an understanding into your personality. And what you’re gonna understand is your three dominant archetypes. For example, I am an advocate, an innovator, and a maverick. And we do it in a very fun way. So what we’ll do is we’ll tie a celebrity to that archetype. So the Advocate on our side is the Pope and innovator’s Barack Obama, and the maverick’s Richard Branson. So, in a way, I’m a combination of all through those people. So our users, they love it because there were anchoring towards a celebrity, and it’s something that’s aspirational but really too they are. We’re basically showing them, at the utmost level, this is who would represent you.

Peggy: I mean, at one level because of my marketing and mobile marketing background in the industry, I say to myself, “Boy, brands would sell their souls to have that. You would have persona and audience segmentation orgasms because it would just be all the information about you.” It’s not just demographics. It’s everything. But you’re not gonna use that for that. You’re gonna use it to superpower HR so that people can get the teams they need to have in place to do the stuff they wanna do. Is that right?

Armando: Exactly, yeah. Orgasms are good, and we could definitely [crosstalk 00:03:06] Yeah. We could definitely use that data in that particular way, but yes, I think what we wanna do is we wanna give a hiring managers, HR directors, a super power. We wanna be able to, one, allow them to assess the teams that they have, whether it’s a sales team, the business development, team the engineering team. Next when they understand the culture of that team, next when they have a candidate who is applying for a role, they will see…we’re gonna check the fit score to not only that hiring manager but to that team and also to that company because LinkedIn does a very good job of telling you, “Hey, you have the right skills for the job.” But you as an applicant have no idea what the culture is until you’re already in there. And if you’re already in there and you don’t like the culture of the company, it’s too late because during the interview process, everyone’s a beautiful liar, everyone’s telling you what they want you to hear.

Peggy: Yeah. And we know too many those people who are really talented, yeah. But if they can’t articulate it or work in a team, what good is it? So, I guess the question is to understand the business model, understand the purpose of the company. But at the end of the day, you also have to make money. So as the companies come to you and say, “I wanna have your app. I want to give this test and I’ll pay you,” I mean, how’s it work?

Armando: So also great question. The problem that we’re addressing just to kind of start off the top is two out of three employees are disengaged, meaning for slightly better pay, they’re gonna leave you for that next job. And it’s a very expensive mistake. The cost to hire and onboard an employee can cost upwards of $50,000. So if you’re looking at a 100 person company and 66 people are disengaged or are ready to churn out, you’re looking at a million dollar problem at a small startup. Now, if you look at it at scale at a big company, it’s an epidemic. And so the tools that we’re building are enterprise level tools for hiring managers so they can essentially understand again who they have, what the personalities are and how they all fit together, the teams essentially are representative of that company because the company has many micro cultures. The sales team has a different culture than the engineering team. The company is not just one entity. Ultimately, it will form this large culture persona. But from the teams individually, they’re different. So when we’re building the tools for these hiring managers, what we’re simply doing is we’re giving the opportunity to hire for culture fit because again, that’s something that hasn’t really been quantitative, and we’re making a quantitative through our series of very fun and insightful quizzes.

Peggy: So it sounds to me quite unique, but I can’t know everything. So I’m gonna ask you, is this out there already or is this something possibly very cutting edge?

Armando: This is very cutting edge.

Peggy: Okay. In your app and website or just app?

Armando: We do have a website where you can go and take the quizzes. We also have an Android and iOS app, and we are about to launch our Team Dynamics Product, which is gonna be our enterprise level product. And ultimately, what we’re seeing is the response is amazing. So the way that you get started with Good&Co; as a company is we’ll start with your executive team, and we’ll see how does that executive team fit together, and then we’ll give you insights on how they would better work together. And that’s what we call our culture report or our culture showcase. Along with the culture showcase, you get a team dossier. So you can see essentially what everyone’s role is and what their personality is and essentially how they work well together. And we give you strategy and tactics to ultimately improve and get better. So once we start there, the next level is then to do an assessment of the organization. And at that point now we know how the executives personalities mesh with the organization as a whole. So ultimately, through this culture showcase, that’s the starting off point because at first, we have to assess who the company is before we can start to assess potential employees who are gonna come into the company.

Peggy: And so is it… I hate to use those SaaS models and go into abbreviations here but it sounds like software as a service. On enterprise I say, “Yep, I’ll buy into this. Give it to me.” And you license it to me or you give it to me on some sort of basis and I say, “I want your software for a year. I wanna completely rejuvenate my company, and you’re gonna help me.” Is that how it works?

Armando: It is. So it is an enterprise model. You pay a monthly fee, and ultimately that monthly fee allows you access to many features. For example, one of the features is what we call a perfect profile. So a perfect profile is…imagine you have a team of 50 sellers, but three of them are really good, and you wish you could replicate those three. Well, actually, you can because with Good&Co; and our perfect profile product, which you’ll be able to do is you’ll assess those three people. You’ll know their personalities, and what we we’ll do is that we’ll then mash them together, make one personality and so that any hiring, any person that’s gonna be hired into the sales team will then be measured against that perfect profile.

Peggy: I sort of like this in a way. I’m gonna be devil’s advocate for a moment. I’m gonna be like really evil here for a moment because we all know the buzzwords. If you come into the interview and you say, “Oh, I’m really…” What is it? “I’m passionate and I am…” all the buzzwords, you rattle them off, you can fool most of the people most of the time, but this is a little bit almost like a mash-up of “Blade Runner” meets HR. You know, “I’ve got the question. You don’t know what I’m looking for and if I’m gonna ask you and I’m gonna go check.” It’s a great way to sort of like really tell the real people from the candidates who just wanna have multi-million dollar job or career. I mean, am I seeing this right?

Armando. It’s true. Well, “Blade Runner” is…

Peggy: It’s not looking for Replicants, but…

Armando: Yeah, you’re not looking… What you’re looking for is you’re looking to make sure that you are hiring the right people. You’re removing the poison pills from your organization. You’re increasing the engagement of these employees because you’re putting them in environments that’s gonna make them thrive because not only are they doing meaningful work but they’re doing it with people who they mesh well with. And then we’re making this a repeatable process because ultimately, you’re using our tool to hire. And so we’re giving you that insight. So if you really think about it, we’re kind of a lovechild of eHarmony and Linkedin.

Peggy: Yeah. Yeah, I can see that. You talked about this chip. Is there any thought of making this more accessible to all the companies that need to hire? I mean, it’s great to have an enterprise model, but if you have an app, then you can automate and bring it down be sort of like on-demand doing this for mid-sized companies, others.

Armando: Yeah, definitely. I can back up a little bit, but if you’re looking at our model, we’ve had the privilege of building up this consumer side of our business first and getting millions of people to download. We have over 2 million profiles in our system, over 10,000 companies with over 50 million quizzes completed, which is what makes us the largest psychometric database in the world. And if you’re looking at the network effects of Slack and how they’ve penetrated their industry, what happened was that people use Slack at an industry the next is the boss is like, “Well, you guys are all using Slack. Well, we might as well use Slack.” It’s the same thing with Good&Co; because ultimately, as these users are using our product and they work at Apple, Apple will be like, “Well, how do they know about our culture? Where did this come from?” It’s like, well, because everyone took the quizzes and now they have an understanding of who we are, and you can game it, and you can’t change it. It’s just who you are. And so by looking at it from that perspective… And it’s the same way that Yammer grew. So these network effects are tried and true. Seventy percent of the company…sorry, 70% of the companies in Silicon Valley that kind of used this network effect model became billion-dollar companies. We’re hoping to do the same thing.

Peggy: Well, I wanna hear more about your story, but right now we have to get break. So listeners, don’t go away. We’ll be right back. We’ll talk more about Good&Co; and we’ll talk about the next big thing on the horizon for you guys. So don’t go away. We’ll be right back.

And we are back. Welcome back to Mobile Growth and we have Armando Osuna, VP Global Sales, BD, and Customer Success At Good&Co;. And I think success is where we wanna take it here because I wanna understand the success of the model because ultimately, at the beginning of everything, it’s about getting me, acquiring me as a user to take these tests. So tell me first a little bit about the test. Then we can talk about how you acquire the users.

Armando: Yes. So the test itself, so you’ll download the app or you’ll visit our website good.co. And it’s also the same name in the app store. Yeah, you’re presented with the first quiz and the first quiz tells us a lot about you. It’s 18 questions, and it’s again very fun questions such as, “Would you rather win the Nobel Prize or an NBA championship?” It gives us a lot insight because one is more individualistic and one’s more team oriented. But when you’re taking the quiz, you’re not really thinking about it. And there’s a slider, so it’s not one extreme or the other. So there’s a slider. So you’re saying, “Oh, well, I like the idea of a Nobel Peace Prize, because I really care about people, so I’ll put the slider kind of towards the middle left.” And as you’re going through the actual app and you’re finishing these quizzes, next the other questions that are gonna come up are another quiz on what are your unique strengths? How do you come across to others? What are your networking strengths? What’s your approach to getting things done? So these are all very fun, very fast quizzes. While Myers-Briggs is this really long test and has a very low opt-in rate of like 10% completion rates or something that your boss is making you do.

We have about a 92% completion rate because it’s so fast. It’s built for today’s audience, the Millennial workforce. Millennials are now becoming middle managers, and we need to build products for them that are gonna be engaging. And we’ve discovered that by making it fun, making it very…anchoring it towards celebrities in terms of your personality archetype. We kind of stumbled on to this that, “Wow, this is really taking off.” We have over 2 million profiles, 50,000 quizzes answered, 10,000 companies on our platform. I think we’ve really hit on to something.

In terms of the growth, I think the one unique thing about what we’re doing is that…there’s a metric called K factor. K factor is all about virality, how many people are sharing your app, but because I wanna know how I would get along with Peggy, I’m going to send you a message to say, “Hey, download Good&Co;.” I wanna see how our personalities would mesh or how we’re different. I wanna get those insights. And because I’m sharing that out to you and you’re my friend, you’re gonna download it because it’s coming from a person that you trust. And so we’ve been lucky enough to have very low user acquisition costs because of those social features and because people are sharing it out with their friends and their loved ones. And ultimately, it’s been part of our growth.

Peggy: When they’re sharing it, is that sort of like validating your data models because these are just us. And then those data models, you’re turning that around and it’s allowing you to really focus on HR because you’re using the power of us, right, so like crowdsourcing to get very specific. That’s interesting at that level. How are you going to keep people…at one level, it’s like, “Yeah, I love the test. That’s good.” But we have to keep on coming back. We have to evolve with it. We have to get deeper because you’re gonna look a deeper personality traits. How do you do that with your user acquisition strategy to get us to come back or to get us to look back at you in another month or so? You’re not gonna have the novelty graph.

Armando: We are a global company. We have a psychometrics team in London and our chief psychometrics officer, Dr. Carrie Schofield [SP], two PhDs, much smarter than me. She and her team are continuously putting out quizzes that ultimately are gonna allow you to add more dimension to your profile on good.co so that we start to know who you are at all levels. And so that psychometrics team is very important to our growth and to our success because they’re the ones that are essentially driving the content so to speak that’s gonna bring people back in. And ultimately, that’s the ways that we can essentially bring people back into the app, say, “Oh, there’s new quizzes available.”

Peggy: Quizzes.

Armando: Mm-hmm.

Peggy: That’s it because that is the nirvana, you’ve gotta be fresh. You gotta be relevant, so you’re gonna do that by having different quizzes and then with such a smart team, they’re gonna go deeper and deeper and it’s a fascinating model. What about the idea of giving this back in some sense to the companies so that not only do they know how to hire, but is there something about how to progress with the people they’ve hired?

Armando: Yeah. So that’s a really great question. And I think the engagement tools that we’re building are going to allow us to landmark an employee when they’ve joined. So we’ll know where they’re at in three months, are you happy? Is the team that you joined what you expected? So as we’re building these tools out for these hiring managers to give them that insight and we become more outcome-based then…the one thing that I haven’t really touched upon is that we can use basically art of artificial intelligence, Big Data because we have these huge data sets that then predict outcomes. And that’s the future. The future is us letting you know with a pretty high degree that this person is gonna be both a perfect fit culturally and they’re gonna have the right skills. So the vision for Good&Co; is starting here, but it’s so much bigger. And that’s what really has me excited. I joined the company from the attribution space. Previously, I was a VP of Sales at Adjust. I was also the head of customer success at Appsfire. Coming into this, I understand essentially how important it is to measure these things and make sure that you’re doing all the right things to capture all these huge data because at the end of the day, there’s so much data being produced that it can overwhelm you. And we have a pretty amazing marketing team and data analytics team that is driving insights that allow me as a business practitioner to essentially sell better because I have the right insight, the right data to then touch that nerve with that person on the other side of the table who I’m selling to drive home the story of Good&Co;.

Peggy: And it doesn’t sound like you’re gonna have to be investing in marketing anytime soon.

Armando: I would say that that definitely is something that we’re exploring more and more to pay channels because…while we have these very low user acquisition costs, I think when you look at B2B leads and looking at driving, it’s expensive. It’s expensive to me reach a very specific HR professional. Facebook allows you to do that to an extent, LinkedIn does. There comes a cost with that. But hey, if it cost me 100 to bring in 5 or 6-figure opportunity, it’s okay.

Peggy: And you’re a data-driven company.

Armando: Exactly.

Peggy: You’ll be able to handle the metrics unpaid. It will be you’re not…what’s it, spray-and-pray. You’ll be like, “No, we know what we want. We’re gonna go in there. We’re gonna buy it. It’s gonna be worth it, valued.” Everything has a price. So this is good, Armando. So how can listeners keep up with what’s going on over there, maybe stay in touch with you? Maybe they’re thrilled and wanna find out more about how this model is evolving because it’s much, much cooler than demographics by far.

Armando: It is. So there are a couple ways. First, I encourage you guys to download our app.

Peggy: I’m gonna do that.

Armando: Download Good&Co; in both iOS and Android. If for some reason you don’t have a smartphone and you’re a very small percentage of folks who don’t have that, you can visit our website and also take the quizzes from there as well. If you wanna keep up with me, I’m on Twitter at AO619. I mostly tweet about sports randomness and memes, but hey, I own it. I love it. Yeah, this has been a really great talk, Peggy.

Peggy: Absolutely. I love to have you back. And probably that sport thing is just part of the test. You’re a rebel, you’re not gonna be like everyone else.

Armando: That’s true.

Peggy: Great to have you. And everyone, thanks for listening into this episode of Mobile Growth Podcast.